


PAIN.0

by TheKludge



Series: PAIN.0 [1]
Category: Ghost in the Shell (Anime & Manga), Overlord - Maruyama Kugane & Related Fandoms, Ready Player One - Ernest Cline, Serial Experiments Lain, Sword Art Online
Genre: Alternate Universe - Original, Five minutes in the future
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-10-13
Packaged: 2019-06-28 16:27:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15710970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheKludge/pseuds/TheKludge
Summary: Scientists have worked for decades to develop the technology to seamlessly integrate computers into our brains.  The technology was dreamed of, researched, engineered, built, improved, sold, re-engineered, rebuilt, and sold again over the careers of thousands of men and women.  Soon, ready or not, we will have this capability.  So what happens at the edge then?  Perhaps a teenage boy named Joey, an early adopter can show us.On the new frontier of virtual reality, coders, players, hackers, businesses, enthusiasts, and a nervous public explore the boundaries of experience.  And they reckon with problems no one expected when you push the envelope of our human reality.This story is out-of-order.  Questions raised here about the past have answers coming in the future.Note: this is not a direct fan work in the universe of the tagged fandoms.  It is an original piece inspired by them, and the explosion of VR gaming of the mid to late 20-teens.So, to begin, picture a deathmatch-type shooter video game.  And a teenager up late with school tomorrow...





	1. PAIN.0

… it didn’t feel like a gunshot.  Not like he’d imagined it, at least.  And it felt nothing like the simple stinging shock the game usually used to indicate such an injury.  It was at first a harsh, but blunt impact he felt on his arm. A dull ache persisted for the moment after the initial impact, at least for as long as it took him to register what had happened.

He mused to himself,  _ Huh, this isn’t as bad as I thought.  _ Before he raised his wounded arm to bring his pistol to bear on the ones who’d just put a bullet in him…

...and that’s when it hit him.

The grinding of the shattered bones sent lightning bolts of pain shooting up his arm, and the shredded flesh surrounding them erupted in a stinging wildfire, like scraping a tender wound on a scale he’d never experienced before.  All in the instant when he needed to concentrate most.

He flinched, lowering his weapon and faltering in his escape from the open.  He would have known what was coming next, had he not been transfixed on the novel and terrible misery that had been inflicted upon him.  The enemy team had finally caught him, and several of them drew a bead on his position. 

The detail in these Direct Link VR games was remarkable, Joey had taken moments out to marvel at the design and craftsmanship that went into the game world, but never in the middle of the action.  He looked down at his wounded arm, modeled as lovingly as ever, just like if he’d been hit in normal gameplay, but this time he could feel the agony of these strips of hamburger rubbing across one another.  He perceived the snagging of fragments of bone, not just as polygons, but as real, terrible suffering. For the first time ever playing a VR game he felt a wave of terror wash over him.

_ If this is just a flesh wound,  _ he thought,  _ what will a… _

And then came another.

Slicing through his knee, the vicious impact didn’t leave so much as a moment before the pain set in.  He hadn’t even recovered from the shock of his first wound as an even greater pain struck him. He was falling, no leg to stand on, no arm to catch him, as more bullets ripped through him.  Hammer blows striking every corner of his body, like a brutal mugging as he felt pieces of himself thrown about. 

Three machine guns from three enemy teammates lit up the whole corner of the arena.  Just like in any other deathmatch, if you ran out into the open and just stood there, you’d be gunned down by the other more experienced players in seconds, and that’s just what he’d done.

His vision got blurry, the agony of wounds all over his body turned his stomach.  He began to writhe uncontrollably as his vision faded quickly to black. He was struggling, he was choking, he couldn't breathe, he couldn’t scream.  He thrashed around like a trapped animal, and slowly became aware of a foul smell and savage burning in his nostrils and throat.

He tried to cough, but he had no air with which to do it.  He was floating in the dark but something was holding his head.  Something else was catching his arms and legs as he struggled against the invisible adversary.  

His arms finally reached the piece that had entangled his head, and he ripped at it with all his might.  Plastic latches came undone and his head was free. He sat up with a start, still strangled by something tearing at the insides of his mouth, stomach still heaving from the shock that had been inflicted on him.  He was falling now, he had no sense of where and how far, at least at first.

A wooden floor unceremoniously greeted him, and with a last wretched heave he expelled the bile from his mouth, finally allowing him a gasping breath.  The breath took down with it much of the horrid substance however, and the fire down his windpipe sent him into a terrible fit of coughs. 

Hacking away, face down on the floor, he finally began to come back to terms with where he was.  The room came back into focus, slowly, but surely. The floor, the plastic VR headset still halfway on his head.  He became cognisant of his foot still tangled in his zero-g gaming chair, and he worked to free it as he spat and desperately tried to catch his breath.

He was shaking, shaking like he had rickets.  He tried for what felt like a whole minute to get his headset off, with success only coming after he’d struggled with it for a while.

He set the headset aside, and reached for the Neuro-optic cable attached at the base of his neck.  Or at least what was left of it. In his struggle and fall he’d ripped it from it's safety connector.  He was fortunate it hadn’t damaged his implant, or the tumble he’d just taken could have killed him for real.  He unhooked the connector and threw down the cable remnant, before rolling himself over and sitting up on the floor.  He was still coughing, spitting, and gasping for breath, but the shock had subsided, and he sat there for a long moment, covered in sweat and vomit, just trying to get himself together.  He couldn't muster a single word or a thought. All he could do is sit in the tranquility of his room, in stark contrast to the previously unimaginable pain he’d just gotten a quick taste of.

His heartbeat finally slowed, and he crawled to his unsteady feet and tried to make his way to the bathroom.  Without thinking he wiped some spit from his chin with his hand, stumbled up to the sink, and continued sputtering and hacking into the sink.  A splash of cold water largely cured him of the disgusting taste in his mouth, but the wavering of his breathing, and the shock rending his nerves remained.  He steadied himself on the sink and looked at himself in the mirror, lit only by a feeble green nightlight. 

His eyes though, He’d never seen those eyes before!  Wide, wild. He’d lived a fortunate life, and never actually seen the look of true terror on a human face.  But there it was, plastered on his own, beaming out from the darkness. He was dizzy, he felt like his head was floating above his shoulders, indeed his whole body was tingling, and although his parents kept their house uncomfortably warm during the summer, a chill ran down his spine.  

The chill was followed by a tightness in his chest and a twinge in his nose, right behind his eyes.  Tears started to well up in his eyes, while little spasms sent voiceless chuckles out of his nostrils.  He couldn’t tell for sure if he was laughing or crying, but a grin crept across his mouth anyway. Those eyes!  He couldn’t stop looking at those eyes! He put his hand over his face just to see if it was really him in the mirror.  He just couldn’t stop himself, the grin parted his lips and his chattering teeth bit into his finger, it was all he could do to keep from making a sound.

_ I get it now!  _ He thought to himself,  _ Now that’s how you play a deathmatch!! _

Or did he think it to himself?  He might have actually whispered it, or part of it.

“Joey, are you alright?”  The soft words came out of the night like a crack of thunder, wrenching him from his pain-high stupor.

“OOHhh, uhh, Mom!”  Joey stammered. “I… uhh, yeah… I’m… alright.”

“I heard a big crash in your room, what’s going on?”

“Oh, uhh…” The adrenaline hadn’t worn off yet, so Joey was remarkably sharp, all things considered.  “There was some… weird connection trouble or something... I don’t know. But I’m alright.”

“I’ve told you not to be on that game this late at night.  Especially not on a school night.”

“I’m sorry, Mom.  I lost track of time, I’m gonna get cleaned up and go to bed here in a minute alright?”

“Mmm, are you sure you’re alright?  You don’t look very good, and…” She sniffed the air.  “Did you get motion sick again?”

“Y-yeah. “

She let out a sigh, “I think it’s best if you take a break from that game of yours, you’ve been spending an awful amount of time on it.”

“But…” Joey began, but stopped short, he did just break his system, he wouldn’t be able to use it again for some time… “Well, yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Well, as long as you’re okay, get yourself cleaned up and get to bed.  You’re still going to school tomorrow.”

“Okay Mom.” Joey said with some disappointment.  As she returned to bed, Joey closed the bathroom door and flipped on the main light.  The shock from what had just happened was wearing off and he was beginning to feel the late hour.  He tossed aside his soiled shirt and turned on a shower for himself. He stepped into the warm torrent and whispered to himself once again.  “Now that’s how you play a deathmatch!”

 

\---

 

“Why ain’t he respawning?” Munged_45 groaned into the voice chat.  “He was talking some mad shit earlier, he just ragequit ‘cause he wasn’t gonna get a perfect streak?”

“Naw man, look, he isn’t even still on the system, he’s completely offline.” Replied AbundanceOfDaves

“Huh, did they kick him for having the bootleg pain mod installed?  I thought they’d got it so the admins couldn’t tell…”

“I would have been booted too,” oOM9FREAKOo added.  “I’m using the same mod pack.”

“Y’know, he was playing more like a regular rec player, being real gutsy.” AbundanceOfDaves mused, “I don’t think he’d ever actually played with a pain mod installed before…”

“Damn, he should’a known that’s dangerous as hell.  If he accidentally kicked himself offline and something went wrong he could’a ended up a vegetable, or gotten killed!”

“Who knows, maybe that’s exactly what happened.” oOM9FREAKOo replied.

“Well, if he never logs in again, I guess we’ll know he’s dead.” AbundanceOfDaves remarked with a chuckle.

“Shit Dave, you’re a DICK!” Munged_45 spat back.

“Well, it’s 4-on-3 now, anyone got eyes on the other team?” AbundanceOfDaves brought the conversation back around.

“M9! On your six!”

 

\---

 


	2. .f SEE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's been a few months since Joey went down the rabbit hole, and like anything else, there are dangers to exploring the fringes. An afternoon spend shmoozing with friends and new acquaintences in virtual reality is suddenly upended when his connection is cut and he finds himself floating in a digital limbo. 
> 
> He'd been troubled when the surgeon who is overseeing the work on his virtual reality link implant quietly handed him a flash drive without explaination, and he's about to get a taste of just how much trouble it's going to be.

“Gyuhhh…”  Joey muttered to himself.  The feeling was not entirely unfamiliar, but it was brutally unpleasant.  In a couple of seconds he’d gone from wandering a glitchy virtual chat hall, to being spun around then stopped violently.  A deafening electronic hiss and buzz assaulted his senses before disappearing into silence. Every degree of his vision had filled with bright, random, garbage data before going all but completely dark.  

The shock left him reeling, wired, ill.  He was sure he was shaking back in his room.  The nothingness he found himself floating in made him acutely aware of the sensory inputs the system did and didn’t simulate.  He couldn’t feel the touch or taste or smell of anything, He couldn’t tell up from down, feeling weightless as he was, but he could still feel within his body.  He wanted to throw up, but he knew that would be dangerous, especially if he wasn’t totally immersed. 

He suspected he might not be, since as he floated there in silence and darkness, simple, white text floated before his eyes.  A debug terminal, displaying some foreboding news.

 

Logout error 307: connection was reset.  #1100CCFF #1100CD00 #11015A00 #BB95CF01

I/O error 426: #EE000104 #2056AAAA #00000000 #00000000

_

 

So he sat there.  Or perhaps floated there in the silent dark, as panic slowly wrapped its fingers around him.  The cursor blinked slowly, taunting him. Inside VR, he had no keyboard to type commands in, outside of the simulated one in-game.  He made the sweeping gesture with his hands that would normally call it up. Or at least he tried to anyway, he had no simulated body, and nothing he did seemed to affect the dark around him.  There wasn’t anyone outside to help him either. He was home alone, and it could be hours before any of his friends realized anything was wrong.

_ Alright,  _ he thought as he tried to reign in his panic,  _ It’s three minutes of inactivity before you’re logged out automatically.  Just chill…  _

He tried to relax himself, but the total silence and absence of all other stimulation ate at him horribly.  That little cursor blinked away, taunting him. He knew what to type, but he had no way to do it, just a few keystrokes and he would be back in his bedroom.  Perhaps the lack of anything before his senses fouled his sense of time, but three minutes by his own reckoning, passed by several times. His patience, already threadbare from all he’d seen that day, was at its breaking point.

It was at this moment, ready to scream as soon as he had the means to, that something even more worrisome happened.

 

The cursor began to move.

 

Once over, like a spacebar was struck, then down like a return.  Three of the letter “g” were typed, and then backspaced out again.  The cursor once again sat motionless, blinking. 

_ Shit shit shit!   _ Panic began setting in again.  The syrupy nothingness that Joey had been floating in suddenly was flushed with the heat of adrenaline.   _ That motherfucking app was a player trap!   _ He thought back through everything that happened up until and after he got the thumb drive.  _ What the hell? Is the whole thing just a scheme? _

He didn’t have long to ponder, the cursor lit up again with a control key indicator, before his entire field of view was covered in a blinding wall of commands and code snippets.  Just as fast as it appeared it started scrolling. Joey caught glimpses of IP addresses, web addresses, scripts he could probably decipher if it weren’t blasting past his perception at the speed of a gaming computer.

A split second more, and everything was dark again, except for the word:

 

Loading…

 

Which too faded, and to both his relief and terror, sensation began to come back to him.

He felt himself pulled forward, and his sense of touch began to return… sort of.  His body appeared as a wire frame with white dots marking tactile contact points. Direction returned to him as a plain rectangular box of a room was loaded in.  He found his footing underneath himself, and quickly scanned around himself for any clues as to what he’d gotten himself into.

Joey recognised his character model, and to a lesser extent the room he was in.  The generic stony textures and the illumination coming from nowhere indicated he was in a development environment.  He'd seen it often in partially completed games he was invited to test. 

He tried once again, gesturing with his hand to call up a keyboard and terminal again.  But to no avail. His mind wandered to the rumors going around school of a torture game. It was an unsettling thought.

His nervous introspection was jostled to attention though, with the sudden appearance of eight characters in a circle around him.  No warning, no sound, just blinking into existence, sending him jumping out of his skin.

They were mannequin-like figures.  Grey and faceless, in featureless black suits.  They were low-poly models, looking starkly out of place in the typically fantastically detailed environments of virtual reality.  He walked up to them to see if there was any detail to them he might be missing. 

Joey chuckled to himself nervously, saying absentmindedly out loud,  “wow… men in black? Real original guys.”

“Good evening Joey.” A speech generated voice came booming from every direction at once 

_ Damn!   _ Joey thought with a start.   _ Well, they’ve doxxed me… they’ve got me locked in.  Ain't shit I can do, except find out what they want.   _ “So,” he began with a shrug, “what's all this about huh?”

A few moments of total silence were followed by electric lightning bolts through Joey's simulated body.  He winced at the pain, though it wasn't remarkable compared to what he’d been through with his pain mods. “The application you were running was stolen, where did you acquire it? And where is the hard copy?”. The voice returned.

“Fuck y’all.” Joey snapped.  Crossing his arms. 

A long pause followed, before an even stronger shock blasted and shook him for even longer than the first.  The voice repeated, “The application you were running was stolen, where did you acquire it? And where is the hard copy?”

_ So, that’s how this is going to work…   _ Joey thought, reeling from the shock.   _ got to tell them something… _ “There is no hard copy.  I downloaded it.” It wasn’t completely a lie.. He had downloaded it… off of a flash drive.

The pause this time was somewhat longer.  Long enough for him to pace around the eight models a couple of times.  He looked them over up close, wondering if there were any little details on the chunky shapes, but they were just blank colors.  His examination was cut short by more lightning, more pain. This time, dialed up considerably. This was about as bad as anything he’d ever had simulated, and he seethed and wrenched.  The pain focused behind his eyes, the room spun, and began to flicker into darkness. 

His head splitting, and the rest of him stinging and aching, he slowly became cognizant of his VR headset, and his gaming chair.  He was utterly unable to move though, apparently the system’s paralysis system was still engaged. Desperately he tried to lift his hands, in a futile attempt to cradle his screaming head. Perhaps he registered a flick of movement of his fingers, or rocked his head, but he couldn’t know.  He was floating in an ocean of electric lava, and couldn’t really feel anything else. A muffled voice came to him, but he couldn’t really make it out. 

His vision went dark again.  The pain subsided, and the grey room flickered back to his senses.  He crumpled his virtual body, and tried to get his bearings again. He felt sick, and tingling, but after the overload he’d just been put through, the absence of pain was glorious and intoxicating.  He started to laugh, the rush of endorphins had him off his rocker. He unsteadily rose to his feet, and the electric feeling pervading his body reminded him of the first time he ever used the pain mod, 100% settings in a shooter game… stupid.

His musings were interrupted once again by the booming speech of the program he’d found himself in.  “The program came from a flash drive, where is the flash drive located?”

“FUCK YOU Alright?”  Joey screamed, interrupting the program halfway.  Broken up by his woozy giddy laughter, he continued taunting the program.  “Y’all sick fucks can’t do SHIT to me! You wanna try this pain game? I’ll play this fucking pain game!”  He wobbled up to one of the eight figures and swung a wild haymaker of a punch at its face. There was no substance to it, and it just went sailing through.  “Kya Ha Ha Ha!” He taunted, “BRING IT BITCH!”

A long silence met him as his giggles slowly subsided.  The buzz of the adrenaline ebbed, and his feeling returned to normal over the next few minutes.  The nothing was getting to him now, and he took another couple verbal jabs at whatever was pulling the strings of this program.  It wasn’t long though, before the voice came back, but this time it was a little different. Rather than a generated voice, it was an actual recording.  There was some background noise, and it sounded like it was in a small space. A gruff man’s voice filled his ears. 

“We’ll be in touch”

Not a second later, the room and everything blinked out of existence suddenly.  And Joey found himself floating in black once again. A distant muffled voice, a high pitched one just barely reached his ears.  Gradually, he became aware of touch. He was being moved, shaken. The voice was getting louder, and clearer, “Joey! Joey, What on earth?”  He recognized the voice. It was his mother’s. His sight began to return, and his room began coming back to him. His Headset had been removed, and his mother was looking down at him, a worried expression on her face.  

“Hi… Mom….” He muttered, blinking his eyes a few times.  The room came into focus, but there was something wrong. 

“Oh, thank GOD!” His mother whispered.  “What on earth were you doing?” 

“Huh?  I was just…”  Joey sat up and wiped his face, but what greeted him was not what he had expected… “Wha?”

The desk upon which his computer sat had been pulled out from the wall, the side case of it was sitting open, and every drawer had been pulled out and dumped onto the floor.  Panic started rising inside of him, and as he turned his head to survey the rest of his room it only grew. Every drawer, every box, every shelf had been dumped, ruffled, and ransacked, piles of papers, books, old toys, clothes all littered his room even his bed had been tossed to the side.

He snatched the link cable from behind his head and sprang up, but his balance failed him.  He barely kept himself from falling facefirst into his desk.  Gracelessly, he regained his footing and rushed out of his room into the hallway, his mom calling after him.  He looked into his parent’s room as he hustled towards the stairs, it was a disaster just like his room had been.  Thundering down the stairs, whispering “Shit! Shit! Shit!” to himself as he went, he was greeted at the bottom by a destroyed living room, and a front door splintered, and ripped nearly from its hinges.  

He stood there at the foot of the stairs, dumbstruck for a moment, before the shock subsided, and he took a seat on the bottom stair.  He set his head into his hands, and began shaking a little. His mom followed him down, and demanded “Joey! What’s going on? What happened!?”

He drew his head from his hands, pulling down on the skin of his face. He looked over what was once their living room.  The realization struck him,  _ that’s why they locked me in…  _ and he wanted to cry.  Instead though, he bit his forefinger for a moment before taking a deep breath.

“Mom, I,” He began before pausing.  “We need to call the police…” 

 

\---

 

“ _ Did you find it?”  _ The voice from the telephone demanded.

“No,” The driver responded.  “He didn’t have the drive.”

“The dog found a couple hidden, but they were nothing but porn and pirated games.  Not the drive Dr. Christopher gave him.” The passenger added.

The voice on the phone sighed. “ _ Alright.  I’ll message you a list of other contacts of his.  Names and addresses. See if any of them ended up with it.” _

The driver chimed in, “You know, I don’t like shaking down kids like this.”

There was a pause, before the voice on the phone continued. “ _ Do I need to find someone else to do this job?” _

“No, I just question the necessity of it.”  The driver said nonchalantly, though the passenger gave him a concerned glance.

_ “Just do your job.”  _ The voice on the phone spat, before ending the call with a short beep.

The driver sighed, the passenger replaced the phone in his pocket, and they slowed their truck to make a left turn into a burger place…

 

\---


End file.
